The game engine can use exactly the same rendering technique as the viewport. At the end of the game loop you just need to tell the camera to update and that’s all it takes to have continuous updates. The viewport seems pretty responsive to me and I don’t see, why it shouldn’t be usable for the game engine too. I would be surprised if they didn’t have quite some performance improvements planned. The amazing advantage would be that if the viewport performance is improved, the game engine would directly profit form that as well.
In my opinion the PBR viewport is going to be tremendously useful for the game engine if it uses the same renderer.
Edit: PBR doesn’t mean it has to be AAA, it also doesn’t mean that it is more time consuming to produce the assets. In fact, if you have changing lighting conditions, it is going to be less time consuming.
We’re not even sure if the BGE will exist in 2.8…
If you want to see all those features in UPBGE, then you need to be patient. We are a very small team and we can’t afford to pay new developers…
10 years ago we didn’t have GLSL and we get games like this:
Today’s games, that are made with BGE, are worse than 10 years ago…
Do we really need PBR or just improve our skills?
I am not talking about UPBGE at all. Due to the lack of development on the Blender Game Engine, it was suggested to bring the Blender Game Engine closer to the remaining parts of Blender, e.g. by using the new viewport renderer for the game engine as well. Like this, those two areas can directly profit from each other. If it is implemented like that, the Blender Game Engine would automatically get a physically based renderer, the same one that is used in the viewport.
This has nothing to do with better or worse skills. It gives the designer more freedom to try things out. They can experiment more by trying different lighting scenarios to check what fits the mood of the game most, without the need to modify every single material. This kind of technology allows indie designers to create games with day/night cycles relatively easily. They just have to create one material and don’t need to adjust it for the various times of the day to look good and consistent with the other materials. This has nothing to do with skills. It gives designers more freedom.
I do agree that the viewport could be a viable renderer for a game. We don’t really need a thing that flies at a billion frames per second because a zero-budget project is unlikely to have enough stuff to actually fill the pipeline. Still, we’re talking about something that may or may not happen in one to a hundred years from now.
No. Mainstream BGE is no longer actively developed afaik.
I think it’s safe to classify UPBGE as a different engine. Bug reports do get attention thus making it viable.
Really comes down to the needs of your project, though.
No idea what’s happening in 2.8
The viewport thing sounds nice, as does integrating external engines. I will blindly trust our overlords to make the right decision.
I really don’t understand you guys, why are you constantly whining about the current state of BGE. It is not triple-A engine, alright, but most of us are also not owning triple-A companies, so it is pointless to add all those fancy features to this engine, because no one will make a real use of 'em anyway. I’m making simple games with BGE and players on Steam seems to really like them.
I am not sure how exactly you will impress a Steam player with those fancy new features you want in BGE, if you are not 50+ professionals working in a big AAA studio.
Because at the end…everything is up to the people, that are playing your games…not you. Why Ton or anyone else will bother to upgrade the engine if all you want is to make simple games, that only you and your friends are playing for 5 minutes total.
No offence, but be realistic, there is unity,there is unreal,there is even widely unknown and widely unused godot engine and their communities are professional game makers, trying to make a living using that engines.(Not to mention Construct 2, Game Maker,CryEngine,Rage Engine,HeroEngine,Torque 3D,XNA,RPG Maker VX Ace,Valve Source,cocos2d-x…I can continue 2 more rows at least )
Until there are not many games on Steam using Blender, Ton or anyone else will not even try to make a progress with BGE, because it will be useless effort.
So are BGE and UPBGE considered different engines now? Whatever, but I agree with @TwisterGE, maybe when a few more features get implemented in UPBGE, we can use it to make a few cool projects just to get the engine out there.
But even in its current state UPBGE is far better than BGE.
It is not only about the people who are playing the games. Other factors are also important, like the maintainability of the code. The Blender Game Engine is barely maintained and is getting very little attention, not even from the core developers. They are going to update the viewport anyways and it makes a lot of sense in my opinion to take this opportunity and make it the renderer of the Blender Game Engine, which means that at least the renderer of the Blender Game Engine will get a lot more attention.
Code always has to be maintained, no matter whether new features are added or not. A certain amount of work has to happen to keep code alive. The idea behind this potential upgrade is to keep the Blender Game Engine alive and to not let it die and to remove it. If you think it is good enough as it is, you always have the option to use it in Blender 2.7x.
I am sure you have heard of the “Interactive Mode” idea. I believe that there is a lot of potential in it. People who use Blender for architectural visualization might directly use Blender to make it an interactive experience. I am still surprised when I see what can be achieved with PBR and a few post effects. There are many other cases besides games for the Blender Game Engine.
There are many other cases besides games for the Blender Game Engine.
I’m sure there are a lot of options for BGE future. However most of the people here are hooked for what it is - a Game Engine…a software that can be used for producing Games, not architectural visualization or something.
I think it is not acceptable to convert the BGE to supporting program for architectural visualization or anything less that game engine.
If it is done…this will be the end of BGE as we know it and the whole community behind it.
However “Interactive Mode” idea is not important as long as there are constantly spawning games on Steam with BGE logo in their main screens. And I’m sure that is what Ton is waiting for.
Anything less (like architectural visualizations) will kill the community instantly and that is what we and Ton don’t want to happen.
Krum have 40K players on Steam, most of them from bundles and giveways but however…THIS IS 40K people that saw the Blender Logo and some of them are involved in this software…Tomato Jones is doing even better for now. So I think BGE have a bright future and whoever thinks BGE will become something less than game engine is very wrong. I’m also sure blender foundation is aware of all blender games on steam and is regularly checking them. Hell…even Blender it self is on Steam for a several months till now with Overwhelmingly Positive comments and many of them are considering it as game engine.
in fact I have the guts to make several,
and I help several other projects whenever anyone asks.
as you have seen over the years I am learning art, but not the best at it.
Game Development is a balance, and the best coder ever still needs art, and the best artist ever still needs code, and humility and simplicity is also a concern.
PBR from substance painter into bge one shot - will be possible once the new render emerges - from what I understand.
I am by no means waiting, (I develop new code and art teqniquies each night, and work side work for paid clients)
discussing the future is not whining, it’s planning.
Considering this game was never finished and later ported over to the Irrlicht Engine, I’m not sure if this is the best example.
One major purpose of the “modern hogwash” is not solely to just make games with shiny graphics, but also make it much easier and much faster to make games with nice visuals and complex game mechanics.
For instance, a proper UI building system with actual 2D drawing code makes it far easier to add interactive elements compared to 2D planes. Navmeshes make it far easier and faster to build pathfinding systems, prefabs/instances make it trivial to reuse and edit complex object setups (that might number in the thousands in the game), ect…
I know a lot of people here like their hackaround solutions for things like this, but a point to be made is that you can’t force people into doing things your way when they can go to another engine and do it in a way that’s more visual and intuitive (so don’t call budding game developers out when they decide not to use the BGE).
I dont think that the argue point is wether people chose an other engine or not… the point is that people want more features (but there is no real products out there to justify the ivestment) and people keep saying that the BGE is not a commercial up to task engine, when from what i see, actually is a commercial up to task engine… people just dont finish their games, the problem with the BGE is the null team work and the lack of motivation from their users, some out there like Haidme are the example of motivated people, if we had 20, 30, Haidme´s in this forum, constantly finishing games and getting them greenlighted, the story would be so diferente, this discusion will be other, and we would complain about missing features, but not if the engine is up to the task or not.
The problem are the users (myself included) have an idea for a game, and for months, all i´ve done is make some assets and learn python, nothing that will asure my motivation will be up to the task, and finish the game.
I was trying to read through all of these posts. I can’t, 11 pages is too much. But this stuck out:
What our community is lacking is imagination
I’d say the community (not just BGE, but many other “easy” engines) lack educated people. I did BGE when I sucked at everything. I couldn’t program and logic bricks looked good to me. My early Blender games were hideous and lame. Most of the time engines that require almost no knowledge (maybe like RPG maker?) attract kids and people who don’t know SQUAT, like me. Once I learned Python and moved on to Unity I got some decent work done.
How am I supposed to make a creative game if I can’t program? All I did were FPS games (or very simple games) because that’s what I could do with logic bricks.
A good example of people given some neat tools but they didn’t know anything: Gmod and SFM. 95% of those videos are CRAP not worthy of garbage bin. Learn how to animate people.
everyone told my the mechanics I wanted were impossible, they all work great,
now I circle back to art,
It’s a feedback loop where I get better, and someday I release a game I am proud of, I have exported things I made in blender into sketchfab and got editors pick.
Those are cutscenes… no logic, no actual gameplay, you can get cutscenes made with blender into the BGE, there are tutorials on that, but that graphics if you consider the entire rundown a game needs to get, at that quality, i would not be posible, just animation, and besides, we go back to de fact we´ve been talking about… How many people did it take to make that cutscene? I Think blender can achive such cutscenes, may be not in realtime, but it can, as a 3d suit as a hole, but dont confuse cutscenes with actual gameplay and pc perfomance graphics, thats just wrong.
Here you have an actual gameplay demo done with blender… for my self if im entering a oneman project, i think that is the place to go on graphics… if you have a team behing you maybe more, the problem with the engine for what i understand, it that BGE Game Devs are not very good at game optimization…
Totally. At least that’s my biased and uninformed opinion hehe
It’s be cool to see it merged upstream, but I’ve no idea if that will happen.
@haidme
You should have seen the UPBGE issue tracker before the great purge (or maybe you did)
So many feature requests…
@cam.dudes
That looks awesome. I’ve used this “Unity” and the workflow is fantastic. Not going back any time soon for… cough reasons. But I’d love to see more of those concepts in blender. The somewhat-recently added Python components are pretty nice. Hopefully 2.8’s asset management makes it even nicer.
@BluePrintRandom
I don’t understand half of your work, but it sure does look cool.
@Smoliterno
That’s a pretty slick demo, although the focal length is driving me insane LOL
Smoliterno, it’s a Cinematic. You cannot dis that demo when the video you posted has no game play either. Player movement and mouse look do not make a game, they could easily throw in their own FPS setup and let you walk around the scene. I’ll throw up some screens of my current WIP, later when I get some screens, to show you what one dude can do.
Pqftgs, I haven’t used BGE for like 4 ish years. The one thing I wish Unity could do is have obstacles be able to use pathfinding navigation. BGE had that last I used it.
I know some of the guys done this realtime cutscene. The team is mostly from my country. It took them 7 months for this 5 min animation and I’m not gonna lie…most of them are Crytek employees or ex-employees ,doing this as freelance job for Unity 3d company. It is really not usable for an actual game. It just shows what unity render and materials can do which is impressive, but then again it is far from an actual game.
Once I’ve shown Blender ge to one of them(the animator of this video, he is also a coder) and he says “I’m impressed, I didn’t knew Blender can do all that things”
)
